One inevitable fact of the holiday
season is that airports around the country will be packed. That means
that millions of American's will be schlepping through airports on
layovers looking for something to do with their time and keep in
touch with friends and family.

Google has already given
travelers its holiday gift with free
Wi-Fi in selected airports. The free Wi-Fi service is available
as of today and will remain free through January 15, 2010. The free
service will be offered in many of the largest airports in the
country including Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston, Baltimore, Burbank,
Houston, Indianapolis, Seattle, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, St.
Louis, and Charlotte. The airports at Burbank and Seattle will
continue to offer free Wi-Fi to all travelers indefinitely.

"We're
very happy to extend our Holiday Wi-Fi gift to the millions of people
who will spend time in airports over the next few months," said
Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience
at Google. "We know that this is a very hectic travel season for
people, and we hope that free Wi-Fi will make both traveling and
connecting with friends and family a little bit easier."

The
full list of airports offering free Wi-Fi can be found
here. Google does warn that users of the free Wi-Fi will be hit
with a request to donate money to one of three charities including
Engineers Without Borders, the One Economy Corporation, or the
Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Travelers can use the free
service without donating though.

“Google gets this year’s
Wi-Fi Santa award for sponsoring complimentary access in dozens of
airports, both to the traveler’s and airport’s benefit,” said
Dave Hagan, president and CEO of Boingo Wireless. “In addition to
the obvious bonus holiday travelers will enjoy, sponsored access will
increase overall Wi-Fi usage in the participating airports and help
supplement the airport’s increasingly important non-airline
incremental revenue.”

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

If you think about it, the overall costs of implementation in larger airports is much higher, especially if Google is doing this out of pocket. There are further issues with a multiple terminal setup (note that DFW is not listed).

Austin's airport is TINY by comparison, I flew in and out of there last week, but it is very convenient for implementation of a wi-fi hotspot.

Kudos to Google for providing a little more cheer :D

Next step, airlines implement a power port at EVERY seat in their planes.

Umm I HIGHLY doubt Google is setting up a network from scratch. (Something your post suggests they are doing.)All they are probably doing is piggybacking on ATT's network and paying the bill for free access.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007